Marxism-Leninism. This teaching will go on for a long time. Sometimes there will be killing. It will continue, I promise, until the reactionaries in High- er Ke bele No. 1 are eliminated." At that point, he looked at his watch, and said that he had a meeting and that we should follow him back to the headquarters of Higher Kebele No.1. He walked quickly from the building, entered a Volkswagen bus full of armed soldiers, and sped off. The Swiss journalist and I, with the guide assigned us by the Ministry of Infor- mation, jumped into another V olks- wagen bus and asked the driver to fol- low. But we soon lost the quarry, and when we presented ourselves at the headquarters of HIgher Kebele No. 1 we were not admitted. I protested this treatment to our guide, who relayed my complaint to his superiors at the Ministry. At the hotel that night, I was handed a telephone message from the Ministry. It said, "We are looking into your case, so if you are not able to keep up, you can leave the country." The Swiss journalist and I, along with two Czech journalists, were also granted an interview with Deputy Mayor Johannes Heroui, a well-spoken thirty-seven-year-old Addis Ababa lawyer, educated in Brit- ain, West Germany, and East Germany. We met at the city hall, in the office of Mayor Alem u, the head of the kebele structure in the city, who was educated in the Soviet Union, and who is known as the Robespierre of Ethiopia. Dr. Alemu was out of the country, and Mr. Johannes was filling in for him. He started off by explaining the roots of local violence in Ad- dis Ababa. From the very beginning, he said, the revolution had been opposed by a left-wing intellectual group, the Ethiopian People's Rev- olutionary P arty, or E.P.R.P., which ob- j ected to military rule and teamed up with the feudal interests connect- ed with Haile Selassie in opposing land reform in the country and in the city He said that when the kebeles were estab- lished, the E.P .R.P. re- sisted them. "At first, 50 the E.P .R.P. merely sneered that the ke beles were useless, and urged people not to join," he said. "After the ke- beles were established, the E.P .R.P. changed tactics. They began to pene- trate the organization and have their own people elected to office. The E.P.R.P. made false charges-for ex- ample, that We were supposed to build houses for everybody but didn't. Then they began a campaign of violence-the White Terror-against kebele officials. In the White Terror, they killed a hundred and fifty people. To resIst the White Terror, the leadership of the Dergue armed the kebeles, and, under Mayor Alemu, we instituted our Red Terror. Maybe the term 'Red Terror' was a mistake. But we had to protect the revolution." I asked him how many people had been killed under the Red Terror. He said he couldn't give a figure. I asked if it was higher or lower than the figure for those killed in the White Terror. "We haven't tried to keep score," he said. He went on to affirm some of the benefits of the kebeles. He said that rent had gone down for most of the people in Addis Ababa, that eighty-five new playgrounds had been built for children in local neighborhoods, that / , , oS > ^ , , t .:: '^ ,... ' .1 , ', . . . ) " o "Little Susie Miller all grown up )) dULY :3 I, I 9 7 8 kebeles had established twenty new kin- dergartens, and that the people's shops had prevented hoarding by merchants and worked to keep prices down. He felt that hygiene and sanitation had been improved. "Four or five months ago, there was disarray in the city," he acknowledged "Now order is re- turning. The revolution, which has changed conditions chiefly in the coun- try, is also working here in the city." Just before leaving, I asked him whether the fairs I had seen at Kebele No. 26 and the Black Lion Hospital had been successful. " y " h 1 . d b . " Th es, e rep Ie , eamIng. ou- sands of people were mobilized, and big sums were raised." He backed off when I asked how much. But then he indicated that probably upward of twen ty million dollars had been raised in the past year. I asked how that compared with the budget of Addis Ababa. The budget was only eight mil- lion, he said. Right there, I had an answer to a principal question about the kebeles. Whatever they may have provided in services and security, they were also a system for mulcting the citizens-a rough form of taxation for the revolutIon. Later, I learned that in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, the verb "to rule" (ne gesse) originally meant "to collect tribute." S HORTLY thereafter, I had a chance to see the impact of the revolu- tion on the countryside. The countryside is, in ef- fect, Ethiopia-not only because ninety per cent of the nation's population of thirty million lives there but, more important, be- cause the terrain is so spe- cial and its influence so pervasive. Ethiopia-espe- cially the central part of the country, which formed the old kingdom of Abys- sinia-is a high plateau, from six to eight thousand feet a b 0 v e sea level, marked by volcanic moun- tains, deep rifts, and ISO- lated valleys. "They tell us this is a tableland," a British soldier marching through the country is supposed to have said. "If it is, they have turned the table upside down, and we are scrambling up and down the legs." Amhara, the name of the eth nic